Bulatlat.com

A Boost that Goes Nowhere

By JOSEPH STIGLITZ
zmag.org

The United States is in the midst of a recession that may well turn out to be the worst in 20 years, and the Republican-backed stimulus package will do little to improve the economy -- indeed it may make matters worse. In the short term, unemployment will continue to rise and output will fall. But the U.S. economy will eventually bounce back -- perhaps in a year or two. More worrying is the threat a prolonged U.S. recession poses to the rest of the world.

Already we see inklings of the downward spiral that was part of the Great Depression of 1929: Recession in Japan and parts of East Asia and bare growth in Europe are contributing to and aggravating the U.S. downturn.

Emerging countries stand to lose the most. Globalization has been sold to people in the developing world as a promise of unbounded prosperity -- or at least more prosperity than they have ever seen. Now the developing world, especially Latin America, will see the darker side of its links to the U.S. economy. It used to be said that when America sneezed, Mexico caught a cold. Now, when America sneezes, much of the world catches cold. And according to recent data, America is not just sneezing, it has a bad case of the flu.

October unemployment figures show the largest monthly increase in two decades. The gap between the United States's potential gross domestic product -- what it would be if we had been able to maintain an unemployment rate of around 4 percent -- and what is actually being produced is enormous. By my calculations, it is upwards of $350 billion a year! This is an enormous waste of resources, a waste we can ill afford.

It is widely held that every expansion has within it the seeds of its own destruction -- and that the greater the excesses, the worse the downturn. The Great Boom of the 1990s had marked excesses. Irrational optimism has been followed by an almost equally irrational pessimism. Consumer confidence is at its lowest level in more than seven years. The low personal savings rate that marked the Great Boom may put even more pressure on consumers to cut back consumption now.

It seemed to me that we were headed for a recession even before Sept. 11. In the coming months we will have the numbers that make clear that we are squarely in one now. The economic cost of the attacks went well beyond the direct loss of property, or even the disruption to the airlines. Anxieties impede investment. The mood of the country discourages the consumption binge that would have been required to offset the reduction in investment.

In any case, monetary policy -- the Federal Reserve's lowering of short-term interest rates to heat up the economy -- has been vastly oversold. Monetary policy is far more effective in reining in the economy than in stimulating it in a downturn, a fact that is slowly becoming apparent as the economy continues to sink despite a massive number of rate cuts; Tuesday's was the 10th this year.

The Bush administration's tax cut, which was also oversold as a stimulus, is likely to haunt the economy for years. Now the consensus is that a new stimulus package is needed; the president has ordered Congress to have one on his desk by the end of the month. Much of the stimulus debate has focused on the size of the package, but that is largely beside the point. A lot of money was spent on the Bush tax cut. But the $300 and $600 checks sent to millions of Americans were put largely into savings accounts.

What worries me now is that the new proposals -- particularly the one passed by the Republican-controlled House -- are also likely to be ineffective. The House plan would rely heavily on tax cuts for corporations and upper-income individuals. The bill would put zero -- yes, zero -- into the hands of the typical family of four with an annual income of $50,000. Giving tax relief to corporations for past investments may pad their balance sheets but will not lead to more investment now when we need it. Bailouts for airlines didn't stop them from laying off workers and adding to the country's unemployment problem.

The Senate Republican bill, which the administration backs, in some ways would make things even worse by granting bigger benefits to very high earners. For instance, the $50,000 family would still get zero, but this plan would give $500,000 over four years to families making $5 million a year -- and much of that after (one hopes) the economy has recovered. It directs very little money to those who would spend it and offers few incentives for investment now.

It would not be difficult to construct a program with a much bigger bang for the buck:

America's unemployment insurance system is among the worst in the advanced industrial countries; give money to people who have lost their jobs in this recession, and it would be quickly spent.

Temporary investment tax credits also would help the economy. They are like a sale -- they induce firms to invest now, when the economy needs it.

In every downturn, states and localities have to cut back expenditures as their tax revenues fall, and these cutbacks exacerbate the downturn. A revenue-sharing program with the states could be put into place quickly and would prevent these cutbacks, thus preserving vitally needed public services. Many high-return public investments could be put into place quickly -- such as renovating our dilapidated inner-city schools.

This may all sound like partisan (Democratic) economics, but it's not. It's just elementary economics. If you really don't think the economy needs a stimulus, either because you think the economy is not going into a tailspin or because you think monetary policy will do the trick, only then would you risk a minimal-stimulus package of the kind the Republicans have crafted in both the House and Senate.

But what matters is not just how I or other economists see this: It matters how markets, both here and abroad, see things. The fact that medium- and long-term bond rates (that is, bonds that reach maturity in five or 10 years or more) have not come down in tandem with short-term rates is not a good sign. Nor is the possibility that the interest rates some firms pay for borrowing for plant and equipment may actually have increased.

In 1993, a plan of tax increases and expenditure cuts that were phased in over time, providing reassurances to the market that future deficits would be lower, led to lower long-term interest rates. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Bush package, with its tax decreases and expenditure--increases, would do exactly the opposite. The Federal Reserve controls the short-term interest rates -- not the medium- and long-term ones that firms pay when they borrow money to invest, or that consumers pay when they borrow to buy a house, which are still far higher than the short-term rate, which now stands at its lowest level in 40 years. Whatever monetary policy does in lowering short-term rates can be largely undone by an administration's misguided fiscal policy, which can increase that gap between short and long rates; that gap has widened considerably.

Worse still, America has become dependent on borrowing from abroad to finance our huge trade deficits; and the reduction in the surplus is likely to exacerbate this (on average, the two move together). If foreigners become even less confident in America, they will shift their portfolio balance, putting more of the money elsewhere. That adjustment process itself could put strain on the U.S. economy. Before the terrorist attacks, confidence abroad in America and the American economy had eroded, with the bursting of the stock and dot-com bubbles. The two remaining pillars of strength were the quality of our economic management and our seeming safety. Both of these have now been questioned -- and the stimulus package likely to become law has nothing to allay foreigners' fears.

As a former White House and then World Bank official, I have had the good (or bad) fortune to watch downturns and recessions around the world. Two features are worth noting.

First, standard economic models perform particularly badly at such times; they almost always underestimate the magnitude of the downturn. One relies on these models only at one's peril. The International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury badly underestimated the magnitude of the Asian downturns of 1997 -- and this mistake was at least partly responsible for the disastrous IMF policies prescribed in Indonesia, Thailand and elsewhere.

Second, there are long lags and irreversibilities: Once it is clear that the downturn is deep, and a stronger dose of medicine is administered, it takes six months to a year for the effects to be fully felt. Meanwhile, the consequences can be severe. The bankrupt firms do not become unbankrupt and start functioning again.

Downturns are likely to be particularly severe when the economy is hit by a series of adverse shocks. Market economies such as ours are remarkably robust. They can withstand a shock or two. But even before terrorism came ashore, America had been hit badly.The attacks added political uncertainty to the already great economic uncertainty.

So here we are, facing a major downward spiral. This is where eroding confidence in economic management comes into play. John Maynard Keynes, the founder of modern macroeconomics, (including the notion of the stimulus) emphasized the importance and vagaries of investors' "animal spirits" -- that is, the unpredictability of their optimism and pessimism. But expectations, rational or irrational, about the future are of no less importance to consumers. Those who are worried about losing their jobs are more likely to cut back on their spending and to save the proceeds from any tax cuts.

It was great fun being part of the Great Expansion. Every week brought new records -- the lowest unemployment rate in a quarter-century, the lowest inflation rate in two decades, the lowest misery index in three. The good news fed on itself, and the confidence helped fuel the expansion. We took credit where we could, but I knew that much of this was good luck -- and the Clinton administration and Fed not messing things up.

Now, every week brings new records in the other direction -- the largest increase in unemployment and decline in manufacturing in two decades, the first quarterly fall in consumer prices in nearly a half-century, the slowest growth in nominal GDP in any two consecutive years since the 1930s. Americans love records, but unfortunately, these new ones are contributing to the already pervasive sense of anxiety. The Bush administration will not try to claim credit for these new records; rather, it will blame Sept. 11. Osama bin Laden is a convenient excuse, but the data will show his murderous henchmen were aiding and abetting at best: The economy was already sliding toward recession.

I wish I could be more optimistic about our economy's prospect. I worry that all of this naysaying will simply contribute to the downturn. Perhaps I am wrong, and the economy will, on its own, recover quickly.

But perhaps I am right. Then, without an effective stimulus, the U.S. economy will sink deeper into recession, and the rest of the world with it. An ineffective stimulus could be even worse: It would harm budgetary prospects, raising medium- and long-term interest rates. And when we see the false claims for what they are, confidence in our economy and in our economic management will deteriorate further. We have had a first dose of this particular medicine. We hardly need another.

(Joseph Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics last month. A professor at Columbia University, he was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 1997 and chief economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000.)

We want to know what you think of this article.